A Friends Gives His Shovel

This fellow that we talk about, Juszklewicz, who gave me the shovel. This fellow, Juszklewicz, says to me, “Where’s your shovel? ” I said, “I don’t dig a shovel, I don’t need a shovel.” And he said, “Here, take mine, you’re gonna need a shovel.” And then the last thing he said to me was, “Keep your…remember you got to be like a bird up here, you got to be watching all the time and remember that!” Because I was more interested in observing because jeez there’s beautiful farmland and everything is fine. So all of a sudden out of nowhere the machine guns open up ahead of us and we hit the ground. And I hit the ground and I thought holy mackerel these people are shooting at me. The very next night after he gave me the shovel that day, I woke up in the morning, got out of my slit trench and went over and I said, “What’s happened? ” And here everyone was standing around looking at Walter; dead, two bullets one in each chest, two in each chest or two bullets in his chest. And I said, “What the hell, why? ” I feel that it’s melancholy and I don’t feel good about his having – such a wonderful man to do what he did, to give me his only shovel and why did he look upon me, I was a young guy obviously he thought he was doing me a big favour, you know. Where did that kindness, I mean you talk about humanity sometimes; you talk about the bad things, where did that come from? This man, there was a certain gift and then to get… The only son of a mother, only son and here she was a Silver Cross Mother she was and was active with the Canadian legion which I am not and to think about as a boy his family came, immigrants came to this country and why does he get killed? What the hell! The senselessness of it all. Like it’s a good boy, you know, I’m sure the Germans or whoever nailed him might have been nice too. So how do I make sense out of that? All I see is a boy in the ground, pain of his mother. His mother must have suffered terribly. Her only boy.